Poets&Quants’ World’s Best 40-Under-40 MBA Professors Of 2025

 

FIRSTs, BESTs, MOSTs, & YOUNGESTs

We love a good superlative at P&Q, and 2025 has several examples of the youngests, the firsts, and the rising stars.

At 28, Michael Lingzhi Li, is the youngest honoree on this year’s list.

The Assistant Professor in the Technology and Operations Management Unit at Harvard Business School has already built the kind of career many could only dream of: During COVID-19, he contributed to one of the first AI applications to accelerate a large-scale clinical vaccine trial. He is a founding member of the AI in Drug Discovery, Development and Commercialization Consortium. And, he is winner of multiple research honors including the Innovative Applications in Analytics Award, the Edelman Laureate Award, and the Kuhn Award.

His students love him, at least judging by the couple of dozen nominations from MBAs and colleagues. Patrick Falzon, HBS MBA candidate, perhaps summed Li up best: “Crazy good teacher on top of ridiculous accomplishments outside of the classroom, all while being younger than some of his students.”

Tyler Muir, meanwhile, is the 2025 winner of the prestigious Fischer Black Prize, awarded biennially by the American Finance Association to a finance scholar under age 40 whose body of work demonstrates significant original research and relevance. Muir, 39, is the Donnalisa ’86 and Bill Barnum Endowed Term Chair in Management at UCLA Anderson School of Management and Director of the Fink Center for Finance and Investment.

Talk about interesting juxtapositions: Muir tells P&Q he’s currently reading “The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1990” – “a real page turner” – but also posts photos of him surfing around the world on his personal website.

And, Emanuele Colonnelli, 37, Professor of Finance and Entrepreneurship at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, won the 2023 Carlo Alberto Medal, a biennial prize given to the best Italian economist under 40. He also designed Booth’s first MBA course on VC and PE in emerging markets.

MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

Despite the U.S.’ current political, um, situation – so long DEI, climate crisis mitigation, and the last remaining vestiges of international goodwill – many of 2025’s professors continue to deploy business education in the service of people and planet.

Take Şafak Yücel and Aymeric Bellon, both training MBAs to confront climate change in their future work. Yücel, 37, Associate Director of the Business of Sustainability Initiative at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, developed a likely first-of-its-kind course that focuses on the business case for sustainability, as opposed to the moral or ethical case. Students learn to evaluate emerging business models across wind, solar, energy storage, electric vehicles, and even carbon removal.

Bellon, 34, Assistant Professor of Finance at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, is reshaping how business schools and capital markets think about climate risk. His dissertation, which won the UN PRI Best PhD Paper Award along with several other top honors, found that increasing the legal environmental liability of lenders can lead to better environmental practices by firms, all without tanking economic output.

And, at Esade Business School, Rita Mota, 39, prepares MBAs to lead with empathy, integrity, and systemic awareness. Her popular elective, Racial (In)justice, won her the MBA Teaching Excellence Award in 2024.

Mota is Esade’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Faculty Coordinator and an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University’s Centre for Corporate Reputation. Her award-winning research explores corporate moral agency, human rights, digital ethics, and gender equity within an indigenous social enterprise in Mexico.

A lawyer by training, Mota for years has worked with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN) on the Youth4ClimateJustice case, perhaps the biggest climate change case in the world. In 2017, six Portuguese youth sued 32 European governments following devastating wildfires that ravaged their country, arguing that insufficient governmental action infringed upon their fundamental human rights.

Mota transitioned to business academia when she realized the extent of the impact, both positive and negative, that businesses could have on people, communities, and the environment. “I came to believe that real change could happen faster and more effectively through business than just through regulation,” she tells Poets&Quants.

TEACHING THE ‘AI GENERATION’

As with our past 40-Under-40 lists, 2025’s professors work at the cutting edge of business, technology, and the future of work. Many aren’t just preparing students for a world powered by AI, they’re actively building it.

At Kellogg School of Management, Assistant Professor of Operations Sébastien Martin, 33, created Kai, the school’s AI teaching assistant that now supports more than 1,000 students and 15 professors, responding to over 120,000 student queries per quarter. He’s also built AI-driven case studies and co-leads a large-scale randomized trial to evaluate the impact of AI on education. The trial involves more than 50 professors and 40 universities.

“I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of what genAI technology can do for education, and I’m incredibly excited about this,” Martin tells P&Q.

Samantha Keppler, 39, is also using AI to reshape education, but in the K12 space. The NBD Bancorp Assistant Professor of Technology and Operations at University of Michigan Ross School of Business spent three years as a Teach For America corps member, teaching 9th grade math at KAPPA International High School in the Bronx. Now, as a business professor, she is studying how the hype of generative AI stacks up against reality for rank-and-file educators.

Across the Atlantic, London Business School’s Arianna Marchetti explores how humans and machines can make better decisions together.

“When humans and AI form an ‘ensemble’, they often outperform either the manager or the AI working alone,” says Marchetti, 37, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, who teaches LBS’ first AI-based strategy elective.

“Each brings something valuable: the human offers experience, intuition, and gut feeling, while the AI contributes the power to process large datasets and model complex patterns.”

And, at IESE in Spain, Enric Junqué de Fortuny is developing a “sociology of AI” approach to large language models to study how they interact, communicate, and even negotiate as if they were social entities. His team found that models developed their own intermediary languages that they are now starting to chart and understand.

“This insight opens new possibilities for business applications across industries. In our latest publication, we demonstrated that when properly tuned, these models can serve as effective negotiators, potentially transforming how organizations approach complex business transactions,” says Junqué de Fortuny, 38, Assistant Professor of Managerial Decision Sciences.

“Once we fully understand these mechanisms, the next phase is steering models toward more ethical and effective decision-making.”

NEXT PAGE: Presenting the 2025 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professors